October 2, 2025 • 23 mins
In this episode I spoke with Neil O'Brien about his book "After Disney: Toil, Trouble, and the Transformation of America's Favorite Media Company". The untold succession struggle at Walt Disney Productions following the death of its founder, and the generational transformation which led to the birth of the modern multibillion-dollar animation industry.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Let's go.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another edition of Forgotten Hollywood.
I'm your host Doug has Now if you're turned into
Forgotten Hollywood for the first time, what I do on
this podcast is take you back on a trip down
memory lane and share with you pieces of Hollywood that
you may or may not know about. And today we
have a very special guest with us today, Neil O'Brien,
(00:25):
and he is here to talk about his book After Disney, Toil, Trouble,
and the transformation of America's favorite media company. Neil, Welcome
to Forgotten Hollywood.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hey Doug, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Well, thank you for greeing to spend a few minutes
of your day with us to talk about your book
After Disney. And what I always like to do with
the authors is that first question is, in your own words,
what is this book about.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yeah, this book, it really explores forgotten chapter in Disney history,
which is the period of time right after Walt Disney died.
The company lost its visionary leader and has to find
its way forward. That is primarily left to the hope
that someday his son in law, Ron Miller will one
(01:13):
day run the studio, which eventually happens. He eventually becomes
the CEO of Disney. At the same time, Disney's son,
roy E Disney is also seen as a way for
the company to have another sort of family dynamic partnership
helping lead the company. So I look at that the
(01:36):
executive level, but then also animation, which have been the
core of the business, the reason why Disney existed in
the first place, is undergoing its own transformation at the
same time, where a lot of the veterans who were
at the company thirty forty years with Walt from the
very beginning, are aging out and they're starting to look
around for the future of that part of the business.
(02:00):
So they start a training program out of which comes
the roots of what is now a billion dollar industry
really one of the primary forces in entertainment today, which
is the modern Hollywood animation business. So the book provided
me an opportunity to sort of tell a multi layered
story from you know, about these forces you know, changing
(02:26):
at the same time at the company, while at the
same time the country's undergoing its own upheaval in the
late sixties and beyond. So yeah, so it's like all
that sort of rich history just really appealed to me,
and I wanted to tell this story.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
You knew what prompted you or get you interested in
writing this book.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
I knew enough of I knew, like the high level,
some of the key events that took place, to know
that if I could sort of break through and really
dig deep, that there would be an interesting story to tell. Again,
Like on the executive level, Ron Miller and roy E Disney,
(03:10):
at one point they were seen as running the company together,
perhaps a year after Walt's death, they are put out
to the Associated Press as the future leaders of the company,
but instead of being like Walt and his brother, they're
more like oil and Water, And eventually roy E Disney
leads an effort in nineteen eighty four to remove Ron
Miller from power. So I knew that would be an
(03:31):
interesting story. At the same time, I knew that on
the animation level, you had this transition happening from the
nine Old Men to this new guard. But then I
learned that there was so much conflict and tension. Don
Bluth is one of the early people seen as leading
the studio. He ends up leaving instead in nineteen seventy
(03:51):
nine and forming one of the first real rivals to
Disney in many decades with his own studio. And at
the same time, then you have this like new guard
of kids from cal Arts who would become leaders in
the industry, everyone from Brad Bird and Tim Burden and
(04:11):
John Lassiter, John Musker, they were coming through Disney at
this time. So it's a colorful cast of characters, all
of which is converging at the studio at a time
when it's still really small place people everyone knew each
other on the lot for the most part, and so anyway,
so it just there was a there was a richness
(04:33):
to the story that I even when I it took
a long time to put together seventeen years, even when
I was tempted at times to put it down, I
could never let this story out of my system until
I got it on paper.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
So yeah, absolutely, Now, if I remember correctly early in
the book, at the time of Disney's death, Walt Disney's death,
they were in the process of working on another movie.
In the process and the Committee of nine, which I'm
going to call him the Old Guard if you will,
(05:07):
the way I kind of understood it is they really
didn't know what to do with that film. If they
should carry on now that Disney's gone, or what was
his vision of this film.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Well, so, right after Walt dies, his brother roy O
Disney thinks about shutting down animation altogether. Yeah, okay, And
if that had ever happened, it would be really dramatic
to what we are used to today with animation. Like I
think animation would have gone the way at the Western
or like the or you know, some other genre that
(05:42):
rarely gets made. And you know, at the time when
he thinks about shutting it down, he's doing it out
of a sense of my brother was this great creative executive.
This was his medium, and I don't know who can
leave this forward if not for or my brother. It's
coming out of that kind of spirit. And instead, one
(06:05):
of Walt's closest advisors, Bill Anderson, says, you know, hold on, like,
let us just try one more thing. The Jungle Book
is almost finished, it's got about another year or so
before it's able to be released. But you know, Walt
had this one other idea for this other movie. He
sort of was on it. It's called The Aristocats. Just
let us do that. And if you let us do that,
(06:27):
we can see what happens after that. So it's left
up to the veterans of animation to carry forward the Aristocats,
And to some degree, you know, they had been working
many times in those last few years without Walt. He
had started to expand his empire to the point where
(06:49):
he would still check in on animation. From all accounts,
he was involved in Jungle Book more than he had
been some of the other films right before then. But
they had sortaty gotten used to operating with Walt enough
that on the Aristocrats they're able to prove that there
could be such a thing as a Disney movie without
it being a Walt Disney movie. And I think that
(07:09):
that's really an important test case and really what gives
animation its reason for going forward after Walt.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Sure, yeah, no, you talk about Ron Miller, his cinema
becoming come into power in charge. Talk maybe a little
bit about how that came about. Was that a natural fit?
Was that something that a lot of insiders felt was
just a little nepotism. Maybe talk about how the company
(07:40):
felt about.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
That well, And keep in mind, I think you know,
Ron Miller would never claim to be the visionary that
Walt was. But what Diane Miller said about her husband
was that, you know when they met, they were college
kids to get there, he was going to have a
(08:02):
future in the NFL. He played for one season for
the Rams. He was, in many ways, as Diane described it,
a blank notebook. He was open to being molded, and
Walt saw in him the ability to mold something, to
be in place one day, to take over the studio,
teach and train. Enough, he was brought on eventually as
(08:26):
an associate director at Disney, working on films, eventually moving
to the role of producer where he could handle multiple
projects at once. And the thing that Ron Miller had
that very few people did was a sense of Walt
the studio head, but also Walt the family man. He
(08:47):
got to see Walt behind the scenes in a way
that only really Roy his brother and maybe roy E.
Disney got to see a lot of that sort of
dual aspect of Walt. And the story that Ron told
me when I interviewed him was about when Walt screened
the movie of To Kill a Mockingbird, not a Disney movie,
(09:08):
a Universal film, and when they were watching this with
the family, they loved the movie. The lights came on
Walt was visibly frustrated because he wished he could make
a movie like To Kill a Mockingbird, but in nineteen
sixty two, at the height of the violence in this
country over civil rights, he felt that it was too
(09:31):
controversial a film in terms of its social message to
come from the Disney brand, that the public wouldn't accept
it from him, And so that stayed with Ron for
the rest of his time at Disney, and even he
would remember it beyond that, you know understanding that Walt
(09:51):
even got frustrated by some of the limitations surrounding the brand,
a brand that he had fashioned. It was his up
and he souped the nuts, but at the same time
it presented some limitations. And so what you see, especially
by the early nineteen eighties, when Ron is running the
studio and the company, Disney starts making some interesting choices
(10:16):
in its film selections. Not all of them are successful
by any means. I'm not trying to like rewrite history,
but they're You look at back at films like Never
cry Wolf, or Country or Splash or Texts, and these
are films that are like not what anyone would associate
(10:37):
Disney with today or in the nineteen fifties. It's they're
really like independent films that are really interesting, and the
reason they're getting made is because Ron's realizing that the
movie going audience of the early nineteen eighties is becoming
demographically more young adult, not kids and families, and so
(10:59):
he starts experimenting with how to win that audience back
to their brand, eventually getting to point where he creates
a whole new label, Touched On Pictures, which gives them
enough space to keep sort of the family element of
Disney preserved, but finding new ways to reach the audience
and really expanding the company umbrella big enough to lay
(11:23):
the groundwork for what we now know Disney to be
a company that can, you know, within its orbit hold
everything from a NAT GEO to an ESPN to a
Hulu to FX you name it.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
The ran.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah. But and not that he had any role in
those later acquisitions, sure, but just by reimagining that the
Disney brand could be a much bigger umbrella for sub
brands really changes the fate of the company, which, unfortunately,
due to a green male scandal in corporators and the
(12:01):
machinations of his cousin in law, he doesn't really get
to see live out its full potential. By the time
he's forced to resign as CEO, only the second Touchdown
film was getting released by the time that he left
in September of nineteen eighty four. So anyway, so the
book sort of charts Ron's career, charts some of these
(12:23):
experimentations with the Disney brand, while at the same time
then he starts to face his external pressure from Wall
Street in a way that you know, Walt never really
had a face or and there never been sort of
a guide for him about how to properly handle a
situation like that.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Well, in the way he was kind of like Walt Disney,
he was in uncharted territories. Yeah, in terms of that,
and you're exactly right. I think that he did a
good job of trying to create vision of you know,
having a kid friendly, but also having arms link away,
(13:06):
arms link away from that to be able to kind
of dabble into other things as well.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, I mean, you know, some ways he even pushed
things in a way that Walt didn't quite live long
enough to see. I don't know what would have done
it himself down the road, but you know, the Disney's
able to survive sort of the first few years after
Walt largely about keeping its head in the sand, keeping
(13:33):
churning out the same kind of family friendly entertainment while
the rest of the country and the rest of Hollywood
is starting to make more mature movies like The Godfather,
Easy Rider, or The Graduate. Disney largely survives, but just
sort of keeping his head in the sand. It's really
when like films like Star Wars and Greece and Spielberg
movies start coming along and showing that, like the even
(13:56):
the young audience is starting to evolve. Right, That's sort
of where Disney has to stop and reimagine itself in
a way that, like, you know, Walth could ease if
other than if Walth had lived another ten twenty years,
Walt would have probably had to face many of the
same challenges himself in terms of the evolution of the culture.
(14:21):
And so they were unique challenges, uncharged territory for.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Sure, Absolutely, Neil. During the writing and the research of
this book, what surprised.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
You a lot of things? Sure, I mean a lot
of I would as I said this somewhere else, but
you know, when I found a fork in the rabbit hole,
I took it but I would say one of the
things that surprised me, in part because it had never
(14:50):
been documented before, was the personal side of Ron Miller's resignation,
sort of the human element of his side of the
story that had never been told before. It was really,
(15:15):
from what I learned later from his son Walter, it
was a very painful moment for him, and it took
him many years to reconnect with many of his former
colleagues at Disney. And again, this was somebody who started
their career there pretty much. He was a very young
man when he started there. He met his wife, Walt's
(15:38):
daughter Diane, in college. You know, within a year plus
they have their first kid, and they're married, and Disney
is both a family and a career for him for
the first thirty plus years of his young adulthood. And
(15:59):
so it was learning quite how dramatic that ended up
being was new information for me. And you know, like
when you're writing this, you you know, you sort of
understand that there are real people involved in telling this story,
(16:19):
and so you know, just trying to do that story
justice without exploiting it.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Right keeping it, you know, like you said, keeping it
right there, without exaggerating a little bit or or making
it more or less than what it really is. Yeah, yeah,
anything else surprised you during this research.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
And right now, I think I stayed with the material
for a really long time, the research portion of this book.
It really was going up until the very end of
the writing process, so there were lots of relations along
the way. I think the one thing I loved, sort
(17:06):
of reveling in was the story of cal Arts and
the camaraderie built from these young artists at cal Arts
that would inform to my mind the humor of so
many of the modern Disney films. You know, cal Arts
was created out of the sense of we you know,
(17:29):
Disney animation is a very specific medium requires a lot
of One of the animators at least calls it like
a tribal knowledge that gets passed down generation to generation,
and that it takes ten years to really master the
technique required for Disney animation, the sort of classical style
(17:54):
with a lot of personality and believability built into the characters.
And that's to say that cal Arts is created to
the character animation program in cal Arts is created for
the purpose of passing that down and moving the company forward.
(18:17):
In nineteen seventy five, it gets created. Cal Arts was
created with the whole different mindset of just art for
art's sake, which is one of Walt's finals visions in
the late mid to late sixties. He tries early to
mid sixties tries to get cal Arts off the ground,
but the character Animation program was created almost a decade
later just to sort of get Disney a pipeline. But
(18:40):
the spirit that comes out of that program is so powerful,
and you see it and feel it in a lot
of those Disney Renaissance films, a Little Mermaid beating the Peace,
Aladdin rescuers down Under and beyond that, and then you
see all the other tentacles of cal Arts everywhere, and
(19:03):
that this whole sort of industry grew out in many
ways from this one sort of seed. It's sort of fascinating,
especially because you know, I started this book around two
thousand and eight, and just to see animation continue to
become such a force in what we stream and what
we watch in the movies over time. Just see that
(19:28):
the seeds that were planted all those years ago really
paid off eventually in ways that they could never have imagined.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
And you know, I know we're getting closer all the time.
But I want to ask you one last question here,
and this may be an unfair question, and there's really
no obviously right or wrong. We don't know what would
have happened. But just from your studying and writing of
this book and the research, do you think what would
have been pleased with the direction that Ron took the company?
Speaker 2 (19:59):
I think I think Walt. You know, we credit Walt
with so many leaving the Seeds for so many great things,
and to my mind, he was the one who wanted
Ron Miller to eventually at least take over the studio,
(20:19):
and so you know, I'm sure he would have probably
made suggestions and died Ron in certain ways, but I
think he would have in many ways been proud of
the fact that this really beloved son in law of
his someone he really viewed as his son. There's a
(20:40):
story told that on his deathbed he introduces Ron to
a nurse as his son, and the nurse says, you
mean your son in law, and he says, no, I
mean my son. And I think that that was very
It's a very close relationship, and I think he would
have supported Ron. Might there have been suggestions and course
corrections along the way.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Are absolutely, absolutely, But.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
At the same time, again like everything's so what if,
because also culture changed so much from nineteen sixty six
to nineteen eighty six was all you know, nineteen seventy
six in the middle there, Like there's so much evolution
in entertainment that you know, I it's great to think
(21:22):
that Walt would have always had his pulse on what
people wanted, and he may have, but he also maybe
could have also fallen out of step. I don't know,
you know, it's all hypotheticals, but I know that the
love and the and the mentoring and guiding of his
son in law was a real thing for him. So
I think at the end of the day he would
(21:42):
have been championed him all the way.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Yeah. Well, like I said, it was kind of an
unfair question because there's so many variables that could have
changed and would have changed. But kind of get the
sense overall that most most likely would have been very
pleased with the overall direction that is centem law took.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Yeah, And you know, and at the same time, like
credit where credits do? The company definitely evolved after Ron
with a lot of success from Eisner and Roy Disney
and Frank Pls and others. And you know, it's become
a much bigger, much more powerful company today than it
was under Ron. But at the same time, it's sort
(22:26):
of interesting to look back at the time when Disney
was an independent Bootsiek studio making family films in this
uncertain time period of you know, after Walt left.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah, well, Neil, thank you so much for coming on
and talking about your book After Disney Toil Trouble and
the transformation of America's favorite media company. We just hit
the tip of the iceberg to our listeners. And if
you're a Disney fan or just a fan of the
movies and early Hollywood, this is a great book to
(23:02):
pick up. Postil Press is the publisher, but please go
out and get a copy of Neil's book After Disney.
You're not going to be disappointed. And again, and Neil,
thank you so much for coming on and spending some
time with us today. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Thanks thanks for taking the time talking to me.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yes, well, thank you, and thank you for listening to
this edition of Forgotten Hollywood. Check us out next time
when we release a new episode. Thank you for listening,
and we'll talk to you soon,
Let's go.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another edition of Forgotten Hollywood.
I'm your host Doug has Now if you're turned into
Forgotten Hollywood for the first time, what I do on
this podcast is take you back on a trip down
memory lane and share with you pieces of Hollywood that
you may or may not know about. And today we
have a very special guest with us today, Neil O'Brien,
(00:25):
and he is here to talk about his book After Disney, Toil, Trouble,
and the transformation of America's favorite media company. Neil, Welcome
to Forgotten Hollywood.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hey Doug, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Well, thank you for greeing to spend a few minutes
of your day with us to talk about your book
After Disney. And what I always like to do with
the authors is that first question is, in your own words,
what is this book about.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yeah, this book, it really explores forgotten chapter in Disney history,
which is the period of time right after Walt Disney died.
The company lost its visionary leader and has to find
its way forward. That is primarily left to the hope
that someday his son in law, Ron Miller will one
(01:13):
day run the studio, which eventually happens. He eventually becomes
the CEO of Disney. At the same time, Disney's son,
roy E Disney is also seen as a way for
the company to have another sort of family dynamic partnership
helping lead the company. So I look at that the
(01:36):
executive level, but then also animation, which have been the
core of the business, the reason why Disney existed in
the first place, is undergoing its own transformation at the
same time, where a lot of the veterans who were
at the company thirty forty years with Walt from the
very beginning, are aging out and they're starting to look
around for the future of that part of the business.
(02:00):
So they start a training program out of which comes
the roots of what is now a billion dollar industry
really one of the primary forces in entertainment today, which
is the modern Hollywood animation business. So the book provided
me an opportunity to sort of tell a multi layered
story from you know, about these forces you know, changing
(02:26):
at the same time at the company, while at the
same time the country's undergoing its own upheaval in the
late sixties and beyond. So yeah, so it's like all
that sort of rich history just really appealed to me,
and I wanted to tell this story.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
You knew what prompted you or get you interested in
writing this book.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
I knew enough of I knew, like the high level,
some of the key events that took place, to know
that if I could sort of break through and really
dig deep, that there would be an interesting story to tell. Again,
Like on the executive level, Ron Miller and roy E Disney,
(03:10):
at one point they were seen as running the company together,
perhaps a year after Walt's death, they are put out
to the Associated Press as the future leaders of the company,
but instead of being like Walt and his brother, they're
more like oil and Water, And eventually roy E Disney
leads an effort in nineteen eighty four to remove Ron
Miller from power. So I knew that would be an
(03:31):
interesting story. At the same time, I knew that on
the animation level, you had this transition happening from the
nine Old Men to this new guard. But then I
learned that there was so much conflict and tension. Don
Bluth is one of the early people seen as leading
the studio. He ends up leaving instead in nineteen seventy
(03:51):
nine and forming one of the first real rivals to
Disney in many decades with his own studio. And at
the same time, then you have this like new guard
of kids from cal Arts who would become leaders in
the industry, everyone from Brad Bird and Tim Burden and
(04:11):
John Lassiter, John Musker, they were coming through Disney at
this time. So it's a colorful cast of characters, all
of which is converging at the studio at a time
when it's still really small place people everyone knew each
other on the lot for the most part, and so anyway,
so it just there was a there was a richness
(04:33):
to the story that I even when I it took
a long time to put together seventeen years, even when
I was tempted at times to put it down, I
could never let this story out of my system until
I got it on paper.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
So yeah, absolutely, Now, if I remember correctly early in
the book, at the time of Disney's death, Walt Disney's death,
they were in the process of working on another movie.
In the process and the Committee of nine, which I'm
going to call him the Old Guard if you will,
(05:07):
the way I kind of understood it is they really
didn't know what to do with that film. If they
should carry on now that Disney's gone, or what was
his vision of this film.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Well, so, right after Walt dies, his brother roy O
Disney thinks about shutting down animation altogether. Yeah, okay, And
if that had ever happened, it would be really dramatic
to what we are used to today with animation. Like I
think animation would have gone the way at the Western
or like the or you know, some other genre that
(05:42):
rarely gets made. And you know, at the time when
he thinks about shutting it down, he's doing it out
of a sense of my brother was this great creative executive.
This was his medium, and I don't know who can
leave this forward if not for or my brother. It's
coming out of that kind of spirit. And instead, one
(06:05):
of Walt's closest advisors, Bill Anderson, says, you know, hold on, like,
let us just try one more thing. The Jungle Book
is almost finished, it's got about another year or so
before it's able to be released. But you know, Walt
had this one other idea for this other movie. He
sort of was on it. It's called The Aristocats. Just
let us do that. And if you let us do that,
(06:27):
we can see what happens after that. So it's left
up to the veterans of animation to carry forward the Aristocats,
And to some degree, you know, they had been working
many times in those last few years without Walt. He
had started to expand his empire to the point where
(06:49):
he would still check in on animation. From all accounts,
he was involved in Jungle Book more than he had
been some of the other films right before then. But
they had sortaty gotten used to operating with Walt enough
that on the Aristocrats they're able to prove that there
could be such a thing as a Disney movie without
it being a Walt Disney movie. And I think that
(07:09):
that's really an important test case and really what gives
animation its reason for going forward after Walt.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Sure, yeah, no, you talk about Ron Miller, his cinema
becoming come into power in charge. Talk maybe a little
bit about how that came about. Was that a natural fit?
Was that something that a lot of insiders felt was
just a little nepotism. Maybe talk about how the company
(07:40):
felt about.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
That well, And keep in mind, I think you know,
Ron Miller would never claim to be the visionary that
Walt was. But what Diane Miller said about her husband
was that, you know when they met, they were college
kids to get there, he was going to have a
(08:02):
future in the NFL. He played for one season for
the Rams. He was, in many ways, as Diane described it,
a blank notebook. He was open to being molded, and
Walt saw in him the ability to mold something, to
be in place one day, to take over the studio,
teach and train. Enough, he was brought on eventually as
(08:26):
an associate director at Disney, working on films, eventually moving
to the role of producer where he could handle multiple
projects at once. And the thing that Ron Miller had
that very few people did was a sense of Walt
the studio head, but also Walt the family man. He
(08:47):
got to see Walt behind the scenes in a way
that only really Roy his brother and maybe roy E.
Disney got to see a lot of that sort of
dual aspect of Walt. And the story that Ron told
me when I interviewed him was about when Walt screened
the movie of To Kill a Mockingbird, not a Disney movie,
(09:08):
a Universal film, and when they were watching this with
the family, they loved the movie. The lights came on
Walt was visibly frustrated because he wished he could make
a movie like To Kill a Mockingbird, but in nineteen
sixty two, at the height of the violence in this
country over civil rights, he felt that it was too
(09:31):
controversial a film in terms of its social message to
come from the Disney brand, that the public wouldn't accept
it from him, And so that stayed with Ron for
the rest of his time at Disney, and even he
would remember it beyond that, you know understanding that Walt
(09:51):
even got frustrated by some of the limitations surrounding the brand,
a brand that he had fashioned. It was his up
and he souped the nuts, but at the same time
it presented some limitations. And so what you see, especially
by the early nineteen eighties, when Ron is running the
studio and the company, Disney starts making some interesting choices
(10:16):
in its film selections. Not all of them are successful
by any means. I'm not trying to like rewrite history,
but they're You look at back at films like Never
cry Wolf, or Country or Splash or Texts, and these
are films that are like not what anyone would associate
(10:37):
Disney with today or in the nineteen fifties. It's they're
really like independent films that are really interesting, and the
reason they're getting made is because Ron's realizing that the
movie going audience of the early nineteen eighties is becoming
demographically more young adult, not kids and families, and so
(10:59):
he starts experimenting with how to win that audience back
to their brand, eventually getting to point where he creates
a whole new label, Touched On Pictures, which gives them
enough space to keep sort of the family element of
Disney preserved, but finding new ways to reach the audience
and really expanding the company umbrella big enough to lay
(11:23):
the groundwork for what we now know Disney to be
a company that can, you know, within its orbit hold
everything from a NAT GEO to an ESPN to a
Hulu to FX you name it.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
The ran.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah. But and not that he had any role in
those later acquisitions, sure, but just by reimagining that the
Disney brand could be a much bigger umbrella for sub
brands really changes the fate of the company, which, unfortunately,
due to a green male scandal in corporators and the
(12:01):
machinations of his cousin in law, he doesn't really get
to see live out its full potential. By the time
he's forced to resign as CEO, only the second Touchdown
film was getting released by the time that he left
in September of nineteen eighty four. So anyway, so the
book sort of charts Ron's career, charts some of these
(12:23):
experimentations with the Disney brand, while at the same time
then he starts to face his external pressure from Wall
Street in a way that you know, Walt never really
had a face or and there never been sort of
a guide for him about how to properly handle a
situation like that.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Well, in the way he was kind of like Walt Disney,
he was in uncharted territories. Yeah, in terms of that,
and you're exactly right. I think that he did a
good job of trying to create vision of you know,
having a kid friendly, but also having arms link away,
(13:06):
arms link away from that to be able to kind
of dabble into other things as well.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, I mean, you know, some ways he even pushed
things in a way that Walt didn't quite live long
enough to see. I don't know what would have done
it himself down the road, but you know, the Disney's
able to survive sort of the first few years after
Walt largely about keeping its head in the sand, keeping
(13:33):
churning out the same kind of family friendly entertainment while
the rest of the country and the rest of Hollywood
is starting to make more mature movies like The Godfather,
Easy Rider, or The Graduate. Disney largely survives, but just
sort of keeping his head in the sand. It's really
when like films like Star Wars and Greece and Spielberg
movies start coming along and showing that, like the even
(13:56):
the young audience is starting to evolve. Right, That's sort
of where Disney has to stop and reimagine itself in
a way that, like, you know, Walth could ease if
other than if Walth had lived another ten twenty years,
Walt would have probably had to face many of the
same challenges himself in terms of the evolution of the culture.
(14:21):
And so they were unique challenges, uncharged territory for.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Sure, Absolutely, Neil. During the writing and the research of
this book, what surprised.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
You a lot of things? Sure, I mean a lot
of I would as I said this somewhere else, but
you know, when I found a fork in the rabbit hole,
I took it but I would say one of the
things that surprised me, in part because it had never
(14:50):
been documented before, was the personal side of Ron Miller's resignation,
sort of the human element of his side of the
story that had never been told before. It was really,
(15:15):
from what I learned later from his son Walter, it
was a very painful moment for him, and it took
him many years to reconnect with many of his former
colleagues at Disney. And again, this was somebody who started
their career there pretty much. He was a very young
man when he started there. He met his wife, Walt's
(15:38):
daughter Diane, in college. You know, within a year plus
they have their first kid, and they're married, and Disney
is both a family and a career for him for
the first thirty plus years of his young adulthood. And
(15:59):
so it was learning quite how dramatic that ended up
being was new information for me. And you know, like
when you're writing this, you you know, you sort of
understand that there are real people involved in telling this story,
(16:19):
and so you know, just trying to do that story
justice without exploiting it.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Right keeping it, you know, like you said, keeping it
right there, without exaggerating a little bit or or making
it more or less than what it really is. Yeah, yeah,
anything else surprised you during this research.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
And right now, I think I stayed with the material
for a really long time, the research portion of this book.
It really was going up until the very end of
the writing process, so there were lots of relations along
the way. I think the one thing I loved, sort
(17:06):
of reveling in was the story of cal Arts and
the camaraderie built from these young artists at cal Arts
that would inform to my mind the humor of so
many of the modern Disney films. You know, cal Arts
was created out of the sense of we you know,
(17:29):
Disney animation is a very specific medium requires a lot
of One of the animators at least calls it like
a tribal knowledge that gets passed down generation to generation,
and that it takes ten years to really master the
technique required for Disney animation, the sort of classical style
(17:54):
with a lot of personality and believability built into the characters.
And that's to say that cal Arts is created to
the character animation program in cal Arts is created for
the purpose of passing that down and moving the company forward.
(18:17):
In nineteen seventy five, it gets created. Cal Arts was
created with the whole different mindset of just art for
art's sake, which is one of Walt's finals visions in
the late mid to late sixties. He tries early to
mid sixties tries to get cal Arts off the ground,
but the character Animation program was created almost a decade
later just to sort of get Disney a pipeline. But
(18:40):
the spirit that comes out of that program is so powerful,
and you see it and feel it in a lot
of those Disney Renaissance films, a Little Mermaid beating the Peace,
Aladdin rescuers down Under and beyond that, and then you
see all the other tentacles of cal Arts everywhere, and
(19:03):
that this whole sort of industry grew out in many
ways from this one sort of seed. It's sort of fascinating,
especially because you know, I started this book around two
thousand and eight, and just to see animation continue to
become such a force in what we stream and what
we watch in the movies over time. Just see that
(19:28):
the seeds that were planted all those years ago really
paid off eventually in ways that they could never have imagined.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
And you know, I know we're getting closer all the time.
But I want to ask you one last question here,
and this may be an unfair question, and there's really
no obviously right or wrong. We don't know what would
have happened. But just from your studying and writing of
this book and the research, do you think what would
have been pleased with the direction that Ron took the company?
Speaker 2 (19:59):
I think I think Walt. You know, we credit Walt
with so many leaving the Seeds for so many great things,
and to my mind, he was the one who wanted
Ron Miller to eventually at least take over the studio,
(20:19):
and so you know, I'm sure he would have probably
made suggestions and died Ron in certain ways, but I
think he would have in many ways been proud of
the fact that this really beloved son in law of
his someone he really viewed as his son. There's a
(20:40):
story told that on his deathbed he introduces Ron to
a nurse as his son, and the nurse says, you
mean your son in law, and he says, no, I
mean my son. And I think that that was very
It's a very close relationship, and I think he would
have supported Ron. Might there have been suggestions and course
corrections along the way.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Are absolutely, absolutely, But.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
At the same time, again like everything's so what if,
because also culture changed so much from nineteen sixty six
to nineteen eighty six was all you know, nineteen seventy
six in the middle there, Like there's so much evolution
in entertainment that you know, I it's great to think
(21:22):
that Walt would have always had his pulse on what
people wanted, and he may have, but he also maybe
could have also fallen out of step. I don't know,
you know, it's all hypotheticals, but I know that the
love and the and the mentoring and guiding of his
son in law was a real thing for him. So
I think at the end of the day he would
(21:42):
have been championed him all the way.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Yeah. Well, like I said, it was kind of an
unfair question because there's so many variables that could have
changed and would have changed. But kind of get the
sense overall that most most likely would have been very
pleased with the overall direction that is centem law took.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Yeah, And you know, and at the same time, like
credit where credits do? The company definitely evolved after Ron
with a lot of success from Eisner and Roy Disney
and Frank Pls and others. And you know, it's become
a much bigger, much more powerful company today than it
was under Ron. But at the same time, it's sort
(22:26):
of interesting to look back at the time when Disney
was an independent Bootsiek studio making family films in this
uncertain time period of you know, after Walt left.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah, well, Neil, thank you so much for coming on
and talking about your book After Disney Toil Trouble and
the transformation of America's favorite media company. We just hit
the tip of the iceberg to our listeners. And if
you're a Disney fan or just a fan of the
movies and early Hollywood, this is a great book to
(23:02):
pick up. Postil Press is the publisher, but please go
out and get a copy of Neil's book After Disney.
You're not going to be disappointed. And again, and Neil,
thank you so much for coming on and spending some
time with us today. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Thanks thanks for taking the time talking to me.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yes, well, thank you, and thank you for listening to
this edition of Forgotten Hollywood. Check us out next time
when we release a new episode. Thank you for listening,
and we'll talk to you soon,
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com